The Millstone Meltdown

You can’t say we weren’t warned.

Chapter 1: The Gathering Storm

The dawn skies over Long Island Sound were an ominous shade of gray, a calm before the storm. In his home down the shore from the Millstone nuclear power plant in Waterford, Connecticut, veteran shift Supervisor Frank Miller watched the weather with growing concern. As a lead nuclear engineer at the plant, he knew all too well the vulnerabilities of the aging facility.

“This is going to be bad,” he muttered, his fingers tapping anxiously on a window pane.

At the command center in Hartford, Jared Collins, the Director of Emergency Management Services for Connecticut, was coordinating local, state and federal agencies. The storm barreling towards them was unlike anything they had seen before.

Hurricane Helena, a Category 4 behemoth verging on Cat 5, had churned its way up the Atlantic Coast, gathering strength. Its fury now pointed squarely at the vulnerable shorelines of New York, Long Island and Connecticut.

By noon, Helena’s wind and rain lashed sideways, whipping trees into a frenzy and turning the usually bustling streets into a whirling mess of dangerous debris. Street signs and trash cans were going airborne. At Millstone, Supervisor Miller, just pulling into his…